Commentary

On Saturday the 23rd October, the Hackers invade The Space! In association with QUESTS, Dragonslayers, and IETNI, HackerspaceBelfast will be running a series of events over 24 hours of software, network, and hardware hackery goodness, as well as screening hacker movies, DIY repair, and maybe, just maybe, how to build a laser. Running parallel to Dragonslayers’ 24 hour gaming event, which will incorporate console, PC, and tabletop games, attendees will be able to both play and make games to their hearts content. ...

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of a ‘hacker’ (or at least self described ones) has very little to do with coding and networking wizards pounding through systems and stealing valuable information or just destroying everything they touch. In fact, Google (and Princeton University’s) first definition of the word has more to do with Golf than security (try it by googling “define:hacker”). The so called ‘hacker subculture’ is usually taken as a group of not necessarily like minded, but creative individuals with or without technical or theoretical skill, including artists, musicians, carpenters, machinists, or extreme knitters, and can generally be shortened down to ’tinker-ers’ or ‘messers’.Belfast is a growing hub of technology, software, and art of all forms within Europe; and with Londonderry being named the ‘City of Culture’ for 2013, it is clear the Northern Ireland is no longer (or never was?) the poor child of British (and Irish) creativity and excellence. ...

If anyone has any interest in CUDA, or GPU/Parallel programming in general, David B. Kirk and Wen-mei Hwu’s groundbreaking “Programming Massively Parallel Processors” is a must. ** The sub-title of the book is “A Hands on Approach” and I didn’t get it until a third of the way through the book, that that’s exactly what it is. The pairing of Kirk, a NVIDIA Fellow, outgoing NVIDIA Chief Scientist and generally world-weary technologist and all round ‘hardware guru’ with Hwu, a well-heeled educator and researcher at the University of Illinois provide a practical but in-depth look at not just the pure ‘programming’ to deal with massivly parallel processing, but instead assumes that the reader can work out for instance how to do Matrix Multiplication the ‘basic’ way from looking at the NVIDIA CUDA API’s, and looks at how to take advantage of the hardware to give sometimes incredible speed increases. ...

EDIT - 2017 Updated broken links thanks to heads up from Paul @ Art of Blog Ok, its been a busy few weeks, and I’ve let the blog slip again, but coming up: Implementing Google Webfonts Ubuntu Dot-File Dropbox Synchronisation Drupal 6 Installation of Ubuntu 10.04 My Revision Scheduling/Tracking System Summer Plans including VPN work for Dr David Laverty and CUDA research with Alastair Mckinley and Dr Alan Marshall

I had a bit of a surprise logging into my weekly stats-fest that is my Google Analytics account; 300% rise in Search Based traffic. My daily traffic is meagre to say the least but still, to see such a jump on the week-on-week numbers is always a good thing. ** But I, like alot of people in this field, like knowing why! My first thought was that Google had recently sent out a press release governing updated search characteristics, and while I didn’t see anything relevant to my site in particular, its possible that general algorithmic tweaks could have slid me up the rankings. ...

I cant for the life of me remember who it was who pointed this out on Twitter, either @cimota or @stuartgibson. Jesse Schell , Author, Educator, Game Developer, Ex-imagineer, Futurist, spendshalf of this video deliberating over the unexpected rise and rise of facebook. The last half is what I found really interesting; Jesse eulogises on his image of points-based future, in line with Lee Sheldon’s High School XP Grade replacements. If any of these predictions come true, I expect it’s going to be a very interesting decade for advertisers. ...

I am sick and tired of seeing ‘so and so joined SOMETHING COOL EVERYONE SHOULD SEE’ only to check out the group and see its behind a join-wall. so I’m starting my own library of pointless Facebook joinwall groups along with alternate source material and a brief of what is behind the joinwall. Affectionately known as FGL. Check it out and let me know what groups you want exposed.

“In this upcoming round of ACTA negotiations, the U.S. delegation will be working with other delegations to resolve some fundamental issues, such as the scope of the intellectual property rights that are the focus of this agreement. Progress is necessary so that we can prepare to release a text that will provide meaningful information to the public and be a basis for productive dialogue. We hope that enough progress is made in New Zealand in clearing brackets from the text so that participants can be in a position to reach a consensus on sharing a meaningful text with the public.” ...

Folks, we’re basically screwed; The Digital Economy Bill recieved Royal Accent on April 9th and is officially now Law. So after barely three days of parliamentary ‘debate’ where only 20-ish MP’s actually spoke on the subject (but somehow 189 MP’s decided it was a good idea anyway), our civil rights have been sacrificed infront of the alter of copyright. Many sites have a much more indepth tretise on the subject than I could do so I’ll keep this short. ...

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhBoY6s-Fhw I came across this earlier this morning on XKCD and while there is very little information on the developers site at the minute, I’ll be coughing up for it regardless.